The time when most of you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

In junior high school, I was an object of pure ridicule for my dress, withdrawal, and asocial manner. Dozens of times, I saw individuals laugh and smile more in ten to fifteen minutes than I did in all my life up to then.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.

Back in the 1970s, Kodak tried to give $25m to a black civil rights organisation in Rochester, New York. The company's shareholders rose up in arms: making this politically charged offering wasn't the reason they had entrusted Kodak with their money. The donation was withdrawn.

Unlike national legal systems, there are precious few avenues to address judicial activism at the WTO. You pretty much have to gain consensus to change the agreements, or simply withdraw from the system. The first is nearly impossible, and the second would be - in the view of many - cataclysmic.

Very few MPs disagree with the need for a withdrawal bill to enable us to disentangle our 50-year relationship with the legal structures of the European Union and to enable us to function effectively outside of it.

Out of my desire to complete Iraq's independence and to finish the withdrawal of the occupation forces from our holy lands, I am obliged to halt military operations of the honest Iraqi resistance until the withdrawal of the occupation forces is complete.

There is a requirement to ensure the withdrawal takes place in a civilized manner. We will be able to show the world we deserve independence and freedom.

The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory.

Freedom is the possibility of development, of enhancement of one's life - or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one's growth.

We are equally glad and surprised at Winston's return to office. It shows that he was built for success that he should have declined to withdraw and sulk over a superficial failure.

Subsidies should never be a permanent feature of any market. They should be introduced only to address market failure and they should be withdrawn gradually as those distortions in the market are addressed.

Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.

I've concluded that one of the significant reasons that meditation works is that it consists of withdrawing our attention, and thus our human energy from a concern, allowing Spiritual energy, which is always there (Omnipresence) to flow in and animate the moment.

You cannot stay invested in someone or something for lifetime, eventually, inch by inch, day by day you start withdrawing.

My soul is disconsolate when God is withdrawn.

I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.

That very breath wherewith they utter their complaints is a blessing and a fundamental one too for if God would withdraw that they were incapable of whatsoever else either have or desire.

Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.

Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of God. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the Godly must claim-so modestly and so humbly-to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.

I suffer from life and from other people. I can't look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful - only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.